President's Pages in Princeton Alumni Weekly

Evolving Libraries

December 5, 2001

Libraries have traditionally been at the heart of a great
university. They are both repositories of knowledge collected over many
centuries and the incubators for new ideas. They are quiet and solitary
places where students and faculty go to seek information, to read and
write, and to think. In the last twenty years, however, libraries have
been changing rapidly in response to the information revolution.
Computers have profoundly affected the ways in which students seek
information worldwide, the format in which they receive information and
the ways in which they store information. These changes guarantee that
the library of the 21st century will look very different from that of
the last century. Two new campus facilities illustrate the ways in
which Princeton is responding to these changes.

Thanks to a
generous gift from Dennis Keller ’63, chair and chief executive officer
of DeVry Inc., and a University Trustee, we recently opened the Friend
Center for Engineering Education which includes a new library for the
School of Engineering and Applied Science. Designed by the
distinguished architect Henry Cobb of the architectural firm Pei Cobb
Freed & Partners of New York, the Friend Center is a beautiful
structure attached to the Computer Science Building on William Street.
The multi-tiered library features access to electronic journals and
more than 2,000 electronic books. Every seat is wired for power and a
special room has been set aside with a scanner, CD burner, and Zip
drive to allow students to incorporate digital content in their
classroom assignments and special projects.

The Friend Center
is much more than a library. The classrooms it contains promote the
kinds of collaborative work that are essential in the science and
engineering disciplines. At night it becomes the gathering place for
budding engineers, as well as students in the sciences, social
sciences, and humanities who are drawn to a study space that is both
comfortable and wired for easy access to the Web. This is exactly what
Dennis Keller and University Librarian Karin Trainer and her staff
envisioned: the Friend Center as a magnet that would promote
understanding of how technology can enhance our daily lives, and how it
can work in the future. Moreover, the benefits from Friend extend
beyond the library and teaching spaces in the new facility. Because the
engineering library collection has been moved out of the engineering
quadrangle, and because the center includes extensive new classroom
space, we have been able to convert significant space in the E-Quad to
meet laboratory needs.

At the November Board of Trustees
meeting I had the great pleasure of announcing a second gift from a
University Trustee in support of our libraries. Peter Lewis ’55, chair
of The Progressive Corporation, has given the University $60 million
that will allow us to construct a new library for the sciences. The
University has engaged the renowned architect Frank Gehry to design the
new facility on the corner of Washington Road and Ivy Lane in the heart
of what has become the science quadrant of campus. The new library will
connect underground to the existing mathematics and physics libraries
and will consolidate the collections of the Departments of Chemistry,
Molecular Biology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Geosciences.
This will reverse a long-standing practice of distributing the science
libraries within individual departments, a practice that has become
increasingly illogical as science has become more inter-disciplinary.
For example the Lewis-Sigler Institute for Integrative Genomics, which
is under construction near the new library, will house faculty from
chemistry, physics, computer science, chemical engineering and
molecular biology, reflecting the ways in which a new field can overrun
traditional disciplinary boundaries. You have only to consider a recent
course approved by the faculty called “Microbial Biogeochemistry and
Microbial Ecology” to gain a sense of the growing significance of
cross-discipline research to teaching and scholarship.

The
new library will bring together a revolutionary architect and an
exciting challenge to design a 21st century library capable of adapting
to the rapidly changing landscape in science publishing and information
retrieval. As at the Friend Center, the new science library will
contain modern and flexible classrooms and study spaces for students,
with easy access to the University network. We will move our
increasingly popular Digital Map and Geospatial Information Center from
its current location in Guyot Hall to the new building. It will also be
the home for our Education Technology Center, a unit within the Office
of Information Technology that works with faculty to develop computer
tools for integrating information technology into our curriculum. This
group also is developing distance learning courses to serve better the
educational interests of our alumni. The new library will have the
added advantage of freeing up space in the departments that is now used
for books and journals for conversion into new offices and research
laboratories.

The Friend Center and the new science library
will enhance measurably the experience of undergraduates in science and
engineering courses. They will provide students with easily accessible
education about the latest technological tools—tools that facilitate
the collaborative approach to problem solving, which is part of the
culture of these disciplines. Both the Friend Center and the new
library made possible by the gift from Peter Lewis will assure that
information flows beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries to nourish
our teaching and research endeavors.